The Woman in the White Dress
Thwack.
Had the ambush succeeded, or was the monster's superior dynamic vision simply incapable of pinpointing where the shot had landed?
Either way, the bullet that tore through the darkness buried itself in the monster's heart in a span of time so brief that even the phrase "faster than the blink of an eye" fell short — like a railgun round.
And it was buried, not pierced through — a distinction that was possible only because the bullet and the gun had been engineered that way from the start.
The revolver Celine carried ejected its round together with a self-contained energy source housed in the casing, discharged the instant the shot was fired.
That power source was saturated with a high-voltage current potent enough to kill anything by electrocution in a heartbeat — a dinosaur included, provided it actually landed the hit.
Furthermore, the tip of the cartridge was a special round designed not to punch through, but to flatten on impact — bleeding off its forward momentum and clinging to the surface it struck.
In other words, the round's purpose had been fundamentally redefined: not to penetrate, but to adhere to the wound and drive its current straight into the core of whatever it touched.
A conventional gunpowder round would ricochet off a parasite with hardened skin, and even when it did connect, the wound could be healed in the blink of an eye.
The gun — a killing weapon built around the human body — held an advantage in ranged combat, but against parasites that advantage inverted into a liability.
A current-laden bullet, however, didn't just incapacitate its target on contact; it suppressed the parasite's regeneration as well.
The reason no other operative could employ such an efficient method was that Celine had come out of the enhancement procedure with a body uniquely resistant to electricity.
Even so, holding a gun that belched high-voltage current would shock anyone — Celine included — which was exactly why she'd taken the medication before coming here: to regulate the discharge.
CRACKLE-KRAK-KRAK―――――!!!
Sparks erupted in every direction from the parasite's body, flooding the darkened building with light so intense it was nearly blinding.
Even at this distance, Celine could feel a prickling numbness in her fingertips — which begged the question of how much current was coursing through the creature that had taken the direct hit.
The spraying sparks made it impossible to gauge the damage with any precision, but one thing was certain: for the moment, at least, the parasite was down and out of commission.
With no time to admire the spectacle, she sprang out from behind the pillar, dropped into a firing stance, and squeezed the trigger again and again at the parasite.
RATATATAT―――!!
Thwack! Thwack!…
Bullets carved flashing arcs through the darkness and hammered into the parasite's body one after another, and with each impact her frame jolted and shuddered.
Compared to Celine's weapon, his own could only be called ordinary — but that was a purely relative judgment.
His light machine gun boasted a staggering rate of fire of over a thousand rounds per minute, and every single cartridge had been specially manufactured to suppress a parasite's regenerative abilities.
The gun and its ammunition together weighed several dozen kilograms, and factoring in the monstrous recoil that came with it, even a battle-hardened soldier couldn't have fired the thing. The only reason he could was that parasite cells had been injected into his body, granting him strength beyond the human.
Thud, thud, thud…
Hundreds of spent casings rained onto the ground with a deafening clatter, and the acrid stench of gunpowder stung his nose.
No amount of enhancement could spare him from the recoil of such an unnatural weapon; his palms had been flayed raw and were bleeding, burning with a searing heat.
His ears felt as though they'd been rent apart by the continuous thunder of gunfire — mercifully, the open space meant his hearing wouldn't suffer any lasting damage.
Click.
Even after dumping every last bullet into the thing, he couldn't shake the unease. He pulled the pins on two grenades from his chest rig, hurled them at the parasite, and ducked back behind the pillar.
Celine, apparently having tracked the arcing grenades through the air, fired one last shot before rolling her rigid body sideways into cover.
KWAAAAA-BOOOM―――!!
The explosion that followed was loud enough to make him wonder if the whole building might come down on their heads.
The ambush had landed cleanly, and every firearm they could bring to bear had already been emptied.
If the parasite didn't fall here, then short of waiting for backup, they would have to give up on taking it down themselves.
As the sparks dwindled and their eyes adjusted to the gloom, the promised fruits of the two operatives' coordinated assault gradually revealed themselves.
When the smoke cleared, the parasite — a bloody pulp, in the most literal sense — was plastered against the pillar.
It was done.
"Don't relax yet. We feed it one more and finish this for good."
Celine's words replaced his complacency with renewed vigilance as she swapped fresh rounds into her revolver.
He nodded, swapped out his own magazine, and squared up to deliver the killing blow.
"Is this the limit of this body, I wonder."
The voice that drifted, unbidden, out of the dark was calm and indifferent — and its owner needed no introduction. It belonged to the parasite.
More to the point — this body?
The parasite, head hanging low, slowly lifted its grotesque face — riddled with holes, hideously mangled — and let it rise.
Between strands of hair fallen toward the ground, two blood-red eyes gleamed, and the only part of it left unscathed — its mouth — kept talking.
"I'm curious, you see. Among the humans who hunt us, where do you stand? Compared to the past, how far have you come?"
There was no sense of threat in the question, and only then did it register — something was very, very wrong.
"What's it to you, anyway? You're trash."
Clack.
Celine racked the fresh round in, leveled her gun at the parasite, and sneered.
"Answer my question and… yes, I'll let you live. Truthfully, I never intended to kill you in the first place — He and I agreed on that. Self-defense would justify it, but… now that I'm the same kind as He is, killing your kind would leave a bad taste in my mouth."
An agreement with Him? She has no intention of killing it? What in the—
What bothered him more was the tone — as if the parasite, in the middle of all this, were the one extending them mercy.
He scanned the creature's body again just in case, but the mutilated thing — limbs torn away, blood pouring from a dozen wounds — showed not the first sign of recovery.
And yet what was this dread crawling up his spine?
The parasite — Rook, if the resemblance held — had collapsed without offering the slightest resistance.
Could they honestly accept this outcome as the product of their own skill?
Celine must have felt it too, because she pressed the muzzle closer and asked, her voice thick with suspicion.
"Hey, you… What else are you hiding?"
"Hiding?"
The parasite tilted its head and echoed the word, as if genuinely puzzled.
"Hiding what?"
"…Right. I was an idiot to try holding a conversation with a piece of garbage like you."
Grin.
Boom.
With Celine's smirk, the trigger fell, and sparks tore through the darkness in another violent eruption.
The parasite took it defenseless, convulsed a few times — and died for good.
Sssssss…
A corpse charred black beyond recognition, and the sickening stench of burning flesh.
They confirmed the kill with a follow-up shot — no reaction. And yet he felt nothing like the satisfaction of having slain a parasite.
What is this… what is this wrongness… this dread?
Celine, too, eyed the charcoal-black corpse with unconcealed displeasure, her expression sour.
"Depressing."
And then—
A voice, gloomy and languid, slithered out of the darkness from somewhere — and every cell in his body, along with his mind, snapped taut.
Gooseflesh erupted across his entire body, each cell sounding a primal red alert that screamed one thing:
Run.
Overwhelmed by that primordial warning, he caught himself on the verge of actually turning tail — and barely stopped his feet, wrenching his head toward the source of the voice.
Beside Celine — frozen solid, unable to do a thing — a woman emerged from the dark.
Bathed in moonlight, she revealed herself with unhurried, languid steps, the corners of her eyes drooping into a listless expression.
Crimson eyes. Long silver hair spilling all the way to the floor. Skin so pale the veins beneath seemed ready to show through, wrapped in a dress of purest white. The woman was otherworldly, uncanny — beautiful, and at the same time… terrifying.
Celine, a Rank-A operative, could do nothing even as the woman came to stand right beside her. She shook from head to toe, tears and snot streaming down her face, paralyzed by pure terror.
The woman who had once burned with ambition the last time she'd faced Rook was now, before a single blow had been exchanged, drowning in fear.
Worse, her bladder gave out entirely, and the puddle spread slowly across the hem of her trousers.
"Ah, u, ah… u, ah… uuu…"
Like someone stricken with aphasia, she opened and closed her trembling mouth over and over, before finally managing to roll her eyes toward the woman standing beside her.
"I feel awful. Sad. Annoyed. Angry. Why did you have to interrupt our happy date? Answer me."
The woman's gaze, which had been fixed downward, swept over him and Celine — slowly, ever so slowly — as she murmured.
"How unpleasant."
Merely meeting that gaze stripped every ounce of fighting spirit from him, and one thought crystallized in his mind, absolute and immovable:
That thing… that monster is a nightmare that should never exist in this world. A calamity itself.